9 October, 2015
On Monday 12 and Tuesday 13 October, at the University of Sheffield’s ‘Migrants in the City’ conference at Cutler’s Hall, there’s a sneak preview of a project by Jeremy Abrahams that is going to be shown in full in 2016. In this guest blog, Jeremy explains the background to his project and what he was hoping it would show.
‘We are all immigrants: it simply depends how far back you go.’
Robert Winder (2005) Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain.
London: Abacus
In Bloody Foreigners, Robert Winder tells a lovely tale of the origin of the name of John O’Groats, the northernmost tip of mainland Britain. The name of the village is not, as you might think, Scottish, nor Irish, but is actually derived from Jan de Groot, a Dutchman who arrived in south-east England but moved north to start a ferry service between Scotland and Orkney. Winder’s point, of course, is that immigration has always been a part of our history, and always will be. What seems to change is attitudes towards it.
At the end of 2013 I was new to professional photography and looking for a personal project. As someone born here but whose family came from Lithuania in the nineteenth century, immigration was uppermost in my thoughts. Partly inspired by a friend who came to Sheffield from Prague on the Kindertransport in 1939, leaving her family behind, I decided to photograph one person who migrated from overseas to Sheffield in every year from 1939 to 2016. This was to be my ‘Arrivals’ project.
Each subject chooses where in Sheffield they would like their picture to be taken. So ‘Arrivals’ is a portrait of the city, of the pattern of migration and of 77 individuals, documenting and celebrating the diversity of Sheffield’s population.
Of course, an image can say something about the subject’s life, but it cannot fully explain why they left their country of origin and came to Sheffield. So each subject’s image is accompanied by a short piece of text – in their own voice – which enhances the visual story and makes us aware of the uniqueness of each person’s experience.
Like most major urban areas of the UK, Sheffield has substantial communities of Afro-Caribbean and Asian origin.
George Grant arrived from Jamaica in 1965. ‘’I’m the youngest of 10 children. My dad – a joiner – came to Sheffield with my oldest sister in 1960 and I came with my mum and five other siblings five years later. When I was a little older, Sheffield United wanted to sign me as a schoolboy, but I didn’t fancy all the training; I just like playing.”
Mohammed Younis arrived from Pakistan in 1958. “My grandfather came before the Second World War, my father came in 1952 and I arrived from Pakistan as an 11 year old in 1958. In 1967 I joined the council’s Youth Service and in time completed my education, attending the universities of Durham, Manchester and Bradford, achieving an MA in International Politics and Security Studies at the latter.”
Sheffield, as the first ‘City of Sanctuary’, has a track record of welcoming refugees whose stories reflect the troubles in their countries of origin. Many refugees from the Pinochet dictatorship settled in Sheffield during the 1970s.
Isilda Lang arrived from Chile in 1977. “As a refugee escaping political persecution it was terrible to suffer torture, fear and nightmares of persecution. Being displaced from the place you were born is not easy, because you have to readjust to everything, practically to be reborn. The language was the hardest thing to learn – it took me five years to have the confidence to speak English. I was part of the Red Cross when another tragedy happened in my life: the Hillsborough disaster of April 1989, where I worked alongside doctors and nurses on the day.”
More recent events around the world have also brought people to Sheffield.
Habib Josefi arrived from Afghanistan in 2005. “The day I was told that I could live in England was the happiest of my life – I would no longer be forced to move from country to country in search of sanctuary. My family had been forced to flee from Afghanistan to Iran three times as regimes changed and foreigners intervened in the country. When the Taliban took over, I was forced to flee yet again. I moved around the world trying to find a permanent home, spending time in Iran, Turkey and Russia before finding temporary sanctuary in Cuba. I learned Spanish well enough to register for a university course and was halfway through my first year when I was told I must find somewhere else to go. That somewhere was the UK, which accepted me as a refugee.”
Of course the free movement of labour within the EU has also brought new Arrivals.
Magdalena Garpiel arrived from Poland in 2006. “My husband Adam and I were running a successful business with a partner in Bielsko-Biala when we decided to leave Poland. We wanted to learn another language and meet new people – a new adventure.”
And finally, the story of a young woman who came to Sheffield as a student, to find herself separated from her family during the bombing of Gaza by Israel in 2014.
Malaka Mohammed Shwaik Arrived from Gaza in 2013 “In 2013 I was given a fee waiver to study for a Masters in Global Politics and Law at Sheffield University. Travelling here from Gaza/Palestine was not easy. I experienced humiliation and discrimination many times when I tried to cross the border from Gaza. It took me some time to start engaging with the community around me, but since those early days I have spoken in many conferences throughout Europe to raise awareness of the situation in Palestine.”
Jeremy Abrahams
‘Arrivals’ project: www.jeremyabrahams.co.uk/arrivals
Subjects are still needed! Please contact me on info@jeremyabrahams.co.uk
A small number of ‘Arrivals’ images can be seen at the University of Sheffield’s ‘Migrants in the City’ conference at Cutler’s Hall on Monday 12 and Tuesday 13 October 2015.
The full ‘Arrivals’ exhibition will open at Weston Park Museum in Sheffield in late summer 2016.
28 September, 2015
War has always been one of the major causes of migration, with refugees fleeing countries torn apart by conflict. Most of these refugees hope to return to their country once peace is restored, although obviously (as, for example, our blog on the Polish Government in exile showed) this may turn out to be impossible. In this guest blog, Jill Rutter, a trustee of the Migration Museum Project, writes about one of the less well-known migration stories of the First World War.
Most of the events to mark the centenary of the First World War have focused on fallen combatants and battle sites. There has been little commentary about the civilian casualties of the Great War, among them many millions of refugees. But there is much we can learn from the settlement of more than 250,000 Belgian refugees in the UK. Their arrival was the largest refugee movement in British history and, perhaps surprisingly, this country was truly a sanctuary.
The Belgians started to flee in August 1914, after the German invasion, with most of this group of refugees arriving in the first months of the war. Later in the conflict another 175,000 Belgian soldiers took refuge in the UK, many of them convalescing from war injuries.
Refugees fleeing Antwerp, 1914. © Imperial War Museum
The newly arrived Belgians were billeted all over the UK, not only to urban areas, but also to small rural market towns. Agatha Christie is said to have based her character, Hercule Poirot, on a Belgian refugee she met in Torquay. The fullest account of the settlement of Belgian refugees is given in Belgian Refugee Relief in England During the Great War by Peter Calahan. In the last year a number of local museums have mounted exhibitions which include Belgian stories; Otley Museum’s Great War commemorations included a collection of Belgian refugee stories.
It was initially a charity – the War Refugees Committee – that assisted these refugees. But by autumn 1914, the charity was overwhelmed and the government took responsibility, with the Local Government Board acting as the lead department. The programme was led by senior civil servants and, at ministerial level, by Walter Long, whose political epitaph largely comprised the successful integration of the Belgians. This was a milestone: the first time that Government had taken policy responsibility for the settlement of refugees.
Yvonne van den Broeck, a Belgian child who came to the town with her parents, sister and two brothers. Image thanks to Otley Museum and Archive Trust.
The Local Government Board organised the dispersal of the Belgians to reception camps, where they stayed until more permanent housing was found. Most Belgian children were sent straight to local schools, where they were welcomed as a visible means of supporting the war effort. School inspections of the period noted:
Our inspectors say that all over the country these children are finding their way into the elementary schools in a very normal and easy manner … The Belgian children seem very happy at school, through sometimes they do not like leaving their compatriots.
(Cited in a report of Local Government Board, 1916).
Tensions between Belgian refugees and the host community were rare. The media portrayal of the refugees helped ensure a warm welcome: the Belgians were fleeing the advancing German army and were portrayed as plucky and brave heroes in the popular press. This absence of hostility was even more remarkable because this period of history was marked by growing anti-alienism.
The Local Government Board encouraged host communities to set up Belgian Refugee Committees to assist in the resettlement of the refugees. There were 2,500 committees of volunteers by 1916 and there has not been such broad public engagement with the reception migrant reception since then. These committees organised relief for the refugees, providing food, clothing and other assistance.
Pages from a booklet listing work done by the Chelsea War Refugees’ Fund, including the provision of housing, clothing and maintenance for the Belgian refugees. © QMUL Library
By 1916 the Belgians had started to return home – the 1921 Census recorded fewer than 10,000 Belgian nationals settled in the UK. Save a memorial in the Victoria Embankment, there is now little evidence of this remarkable migratory movement. But at a time when there are concerns about the integration of new migrants and the segregation of our towns and cities, there are lessons to be learned from the reception of the Belgian refugees. In particular, the Government requested that host communities should see it as their responsibility to welcome new arrivals. Perhaps this is a value that we should resurrect today and think about ways we can welcome new migrants.
The Belgian Refugee Memorial in London, located on the Embankment opposite Cleopatra’s Needle.
Jill Rutter is a trustee of the Migration Museum Project. Moving Up and Getting On, her new book on migrant integration, was published by Policy Press in July 2015.
26 March, 2019
The year 1968 was one of the first years that the Carnival took to the streets and became a large public event. Before that date, it had taken place in halls around Notting Hill. This photo was included in the exhibition Roots to Reckoning and Archive, 2005 Museum of London.
16 September, 2015
When Alice meets Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, illustrated here by John Tenniel, they have a famous exchange of views about the meaning of words.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
Humpty Dumpty appears to be leading the public discourse on migration right now.
The words we choose to talk about a subject are always a significant window to our position on that subject. In the past few weeks, as they report or comment on the thousands of people attempting to find a new life in Europe, newspapers and politicians have fallen back on rather predictable language. There is, of course, the use of words associated with water – from the relatively mild ‘flow’ to ‘streams’ of migrants threatening to ‘flood’ our European countries, ‘tidal waves’ of migrants’ (Daily Mail, 26 June), ‘tsunami of Christian migration’ (Breitbart, 3 September) and ‘inundated with migrants’ (CBS, 26 August) – all of which, in their insensitive references to drowning, express concerns about the host nations rather than the people in actual danger of drowning as a result of the insecure, overcrowded and unseaworthy boats in which they make the journey across the Mediterranean.
Then there are the references to animals and insects – not just Katie Hopkins’ ‘cockroaches’ but also the Prime Minister’s ‘swarm of people’ (30 July) – terms redolent of infestation and destruction. The extent to which this is a situation out of legal control is conveyed in the use of words associated with criminality, most notably ‘marauding’, applied by Philip Hammond (9 August). And, to give a full sense of the scale of the problem, what better source to invoke than the Good Book, as Nigel Farage did with his slightly tautological ‘exodus of biblical proportions’.
The use of these words contains a fairly obvious key to the user’s position on the matter and may, as many suggest, affect (and infect) the nature of the debate. Something similar happens to the words used to describe the people making these journeys, which have long shed the neutrality they may once have had in their dictionary definitions. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for example, defines a migrant as ‘a person who moves temporarily or seasonally from place to place; a person who moves permanently to live in a new country, town, etc., esp. to look for work, or to take up a post, etc’; a refugee as ‘a person who has been forced to leave his or her home and seek refuge elsewhere, esp. in a foreign country, from war, religious persecution, political troubles, the effects of a natural disaster, etc.; a displaced person’; and an asylum seeker as ‘a person seeking refuge, esp. political asylum, in a nation other than his or her own’.
These neutral definitions are often, however, coloured by the words that are used with them – so that ‘asylum seeker’ now is most commonly associated with ‘bogus’ or ‘failed’, ‘migrant’ with ‘economic’ or ‘illegal’, etc. In Adopting Britain, the exhibition to which the Migration Museum Project contributed recently in the Southbank Centre, the Migration Observatory compiled an infographic that displayed the words most commonly used to talk about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. It was a salutary reminder of the power of media exposure to change the way in which we use words and descriptions.
As an illustration of the way in which words absorb associations beyond their literal meaning, Professor Lentin recently questioned whether the use of the word ‘immigrant’ was appropriate when applied to Sir Edgar Speyer in a blog he wrote for us. Speyer was not, as Tony Lentin put it, one of the ‘tired, poor, huddled masses’ most commonly associated with the term although, technically, he was, of course, an immigrant.
But how do you rid words of the associations they have acquired? One response is to do as David Marsh, editor of the Guardian’s style guide, suggested in a humane and considered piece he wrote on this subject at the end of August:
Politically charged expressions such as ‘economic migrants’, ‘genuine refugees’ or ‘illegal asylum seekers’ should have no part in our coverage. This is a story about humanity. Reporting it should be humane as well as accurate. Sadly, most of what we hear and read about ‘migrants’ is neither.
Any modern-day Humpty Dumpty, of course, is free to disagree with this. But then we all know what happened to Humpty Dumpty, don’t we?
